The Invisible Train

Right now, the true size of our debt is about 15 times the official debt of $13 or so trillion. This is because Congress has labeled most of our liabilities something else to keep them off the books and somewhere (usually far) in the future. Social Security, Medicare, (and Medicaid in a way) were not corrected when we had the chance, but made instead massive Ponzi schemes.

As Professor Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University says, the International Monetary Fund and the Congressional Budget Office have both effectively declared the Unites States bankrupt or nearly so. To pay its obligations, the US must have, starting today, additional funding equal to the total present revenue of the whole federal government; every year we don’t adds that amount on to what is really our collective government credit card balance and necessitates even more obligation. To meet that total obligation, either we double taxation, or we mix some sort of increased taxation and reduced spending, since we obviously can’t cut spending to absolute 0. Of course, we could always ruin ourselves and print more money and cause runaway inflation that would destroy most all our systems. More realistically, we need to drastically simplify and restructure our taxation, health (not just “health care”), retirement, energy, and financial systems, all of which are messes and train wrecks in process. And that probably also means taking away some of the obligations within those systems, because the obligations as presently situated are neither realistic nor sustainable.

Spending more to “stimulate” the economy? Taxing less to “stimulate” the economy? Utter delusions, both of them, and promoted by those who don’t want you to realize they’ve screwed up. There ARE NO mostly painless “solutions” to what we’ve done. There is going to be pain. Deep pain. If we don’t want it to ruin us, we have to face up to it. NOW.